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Farewell To The Classic R300/R600 Mesa Drivers

10-28-2011, 04:40 PM

Phoronix: Farewell To The Classic R300/R600 Mesa Drivers

The death sentence to the ATI Radeon R300/R600 classic Mesa drivers has been carried out. It's all about the Gallium3D drivers now for upstream Mesa for R300 hardware and newer -- up through the latest Radeon HD 6000 series and Fusion...

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I feel bad for BSD but I could care less about solaris. Solaris to me was completely pointless - the only advantage (I'm aware of) was it's SPARC compatibility, which isn't that much of an advantage considering linux is SPARC friendly.

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They were cut due to maintaince burden.
No one prevents Solaris & BSD to port the G drivers.
No one support C drivers, so they are cut upstream.
There would be no upstream changes anyway. There is no damage for Solaris & BSD.

I wonder WHEN intel goes gallium..

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Killing R200? This mean running Linux on my old Macs is now fucked? No more support for the Radeon 7500 AGP and 9200m GPUs? Yeah these GPUs sucked for 3D since even OpenArena ran dog ass slow, but they did well with making video watchable depending on format without bringing the CPU to it's knees and thus grind the machine to a halt...

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Killing R200? This mean running Linux on my old Macs is now fucked? No more support for the Radeon 7500 AGP and 9200m GPUs? Yeah these GPUs sucked for 3D since even OpenArena ran dog ass slow, but they did well with making video watchable depending on format without bringing the CPU to it's knees and thus grind the machine to a halt...

no they fix the galium3D +KMS driver to run well with the r200.

they do this in that way: they emulate some openGL exstansions in the cpu to lift up the r200 to an r300 feature set.

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Killing R200? This mean running Linux on my old Macs is now fucked? No more support for the Radeon 7500 AGP and 9200m GPUs? Yeah these GPUs sucked for 3D since even OpenArena ran dog ass slow, but they did well with making video watchable depending on format without bringing the CPU to it's knees and thus grind the machine to a halt...

We haven't killed r200 support, and I don't believe there are any plans to kill it, either. What Eric did kill was old DRI1 support (you can still use DRI2) and old non-kernel-memory-manager paths. Cleaning house, essentially.

For r300 and r600, the Radeon maintainers preferred to kill the classic drivers in favor of the (more maintained) Gallium ones. Since there isn't a r200 gallium driver (and AFAIK no plans to write one), the r200 classic driver stays.